Perfect (v.)

Your faculty would need four academic years to feel really confident in delivering online learning at all times. The post-pandemic pressure to return to face-to-face settings only gives them three.

Your team would need 10 years of campaigns and engagement to build a perfectly working community on your social medium of choice. The medium enshittifies itself beyond repair throughout year seven, and you close your account.

You and your partner are 6-8 months away from going 100% plant-based and switching your nutrition to local, sustainable suppliers. Then the baby arrives.

There is, in the ideal world, a length of time we deserve to be given, if we want to be truly great at something.

Away from the ideal world, in late-stage caffeinated capitalism, 99% of our learning journeys will be interrupted, cut short, made incomplete - while the same forces that crank up the speed, demand measurable results and destabilize your ride will also crank up the volume on the channels which advertise and emphasize their manufactured ideas of perfection.

This means that 99% of our learning choices are better measured by our own standards. Our "perfect" can mean "make better than yesterday": add another keyboard shortcut trick to our Zoom webinar setup; have a few more genuine interactions on a channel we fully control; or be more relaxed about non-vegan baby formula today than we were yesterday - while cooking plant-based for ourselves.

DIY-ing all this, then, also builds the peace of mind and readiness we need to spot and dive into the 1% of the moments unfolding along the way: the wide open lane, the time we need, the right people in the right place; perfection.